A user equipment (UE) may be configured with a variety of different capabilities. For example, the UE may be capable of establishing a connection with a wireless network. Specifically, the UE may connect to a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. While connected to the LTE network, the UE may utilize further network capabilities. For example, the UE may utilize a carrier aggregation (CA) functionality in which a primary component carrier (PCC) and at least one secondary component carrier (SCC) are used to communicate data over the various LTE bands. To utilize the CA functionality, the UE is required by LTE standards to advertise the combinations of PCC and SCCs that are supported by the UE. However, with an increasing number of LTE bands and a limited number of combinations that are allowed to be advertised, the advertising process is inefficient, particularly as a double CA arrangement (1 PCC and 1 SCC) must first be advertised prior to any triple CA arrangement (1 PCC and 2 SCCs), although the triple CA arrangement may be preferable.
Furthermore, the capabilities of the UE may be requested by the LTE network. However, the uplink (UL) grant size for the UE to transmit the capability information has limited space. This capability information may include the CA advertisements included above and measurement information for the various LTE bands. These measurements may be provided so that the LTE network may be aware of the optimal CA arrangement available for use by the UE. However, other capability information may also be included in the UL grant. For example, gapless measurement capability information may be provided. The gapless measurement capability encompasses the available bands over LTE bands, different radio access technology (RAT) bands, and the CA combinations. Thus, the gapless measurement capability information may occupy a significant portion of the limited space of the UL grant indicating the capabilities of the UE.
If the UL grant is too small for all the UE capability information to be provided, this may lead to various failures and unsatisfactory user experiences such as network timeouts and attach failures.